From the New York Times:

“After a drastic decline this spring, global greenhouse gas emissions are now rebounding sharply, scientists reported, as countries relax their coronavirus lockdowns and traffic surges back onto roads. It’s a stark reminder that even as the pandemic rages, the world is still far from getting global warming under control.

“In early April, daily fossil fuel emissions worldwide were roughly 17 percent lower than they were in 2019, as governments ordered people to stay home, employees stopped driving to work, factories idled and airlines grounded their flights, according to a study published in May in Nature Climate Change.”

Here’s a plot showing the drop in emissions compared to 2019, and the fairly rapid (world-wise) rise back towards 2019 levels.

The “surprised” researchers weren’t so surprised:

“The study’s authors said they were surprised by how quickly emissions had rebounded. But, they added, any drop in fossil fuel use related to the coronavirus was always likely to be temporary unless countries took concerted action to clean up their energy systems and vehicle fleets as they moved to rebuild their ailing economies.

“We still have the same cars, the same power plants, the same industries that we had before the pandemic,” said Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in England and lead author of the analysis. “Without big structural changes, emissions are likely to come back.”

No shit, Sherlock.

I find the flipped and rotated plot equally interesting, for other reasons:

If you can decrypt the February through May double-Greek from left to right, remember that China shut down like crazy in February, got the pandemic “pretty much” under control, and then opened up again towards March-April. China’s emissions curve basically shows that.

The US part of the plot is more worrying. Emissions corresponding to “peak shutdown” are from the start of April to the start of May. Since then, US emissions are trending back to normal, despite an ongoing and massive spread of Covid-19 across the country, some parts more than others. The lack of effective social safety net in the US is pretty flagrant.

Even more disheartening is the part corresponding to the rest of the world, much of it poor. Its “peak shutdown” appears to have been early April. Since then, the overall trend is “back to normal”, despite the fact that only now is the pandemic really taking off in poorer countries like India and Pakistan.

Clearly, to survive financially, or stay alive in a physical sense in such countries—or the US—you probably have to get back to work while a pandemic rages all around.

And this might kill you.

[Cover photo: Yawar Nazir/Getty]